I got a lot of questions about that article. Many agreed with it and understood the concept completely. Others felt like I was contradicting myself because in previous articles I’ve talked about how your higher self has plans for you that your spirit guides help to carry out.

I spent a good while responding to individual emails and posts on my Facebook wall and decided I didn’t do a good enough job of explaining the concept.

I want to remedy that now.

God or Source sends you to the playground of life with the intention that you will enjoy your excursion. God does not decide in advance exactly what experiences you will have. He doesn’t schedule your life. All Source cares about is that you experience joy while you are here.

To use an analogy, God drops you off at the playground and says “Have fun! Don’t hurt anybody.”

Your Higher Self crafts an intention. Maybe your intention in this life is to learn compassion. Maybe it’s to learn courage. Maybe it’s to explore love. So your Higher Self encodes into your spiritual DNA the desire to gravitate towards experiences that will give you what you desire.

To use the playground analogy, your Higher Self says, “I want to master the art of building sand castles.”

This is still not a plan. This is an intention. You can get dropped off in the playground of life with a strong desire to play with something in particular but through your choices, your actions, or the actions of others, you never get the chance. The intention is still there, but it may go unfulfilled.

That’s a bummer though right? To come all this way and not get the chance to fulfill your intention?

That’s where Spirit Guides come in. Your Higher Self “hires” guides and says to them, “Be a lamb and make sure my avatar gets time in the sandbox. ” So once you incarnate and forget why you came here, your guides start nudging, moving, coaxing, and guiding you towards experiences your higher self wants you to have.

But still, nothing is pre-ordained. You are not guaranteed a chance to build castles in the sand. But the drive to do it will be strong, and if you listen to your guides and intuition, there is a very good chance you will fulfill your intention.

What about interacting with and meeting certain people? Is that pre-ordained? No. But again if you have made an agreement with a certain soul to experience this life together, every effort will be made to get you two together. But still, there is no guarantee. There is no plan.

A plan is this: “On January 12, 2000 you will bump into a guy at Starbucks and spill coffee all over him. You will offer to buy him a new coffee and dry clean his shirt. You’ll sit, talk, fall in love, and have 2 kids and a Subaru.”

No. That’s not happening.

Rather it’s, “Hey, the guy we want her to run into hangs out at the Starbucks near her house. I wonder if we could get her to start hanging out there on Saturdays.”

So your friend invites you to Starbucks one Saturday for a chat and you realize it’s a great hang out on weekends.

So the next weekend you decide to take your laptop there and do a little research. The guides are excited because they know the soul they want you to meet is also planning to go there at the same time. But what’s this? His mother calls, she’s fallen and hurt herself. Instead of a Starbucks run, he takes her to the hospital.

Drat. The guides try again.

Two more Saturday’s go by. It doesn’t work out. Damn free will! Why aren’t they listening to their intuition? your guides think.

But finally the day comes. You’re both at Starbucks on the same day at the same time. It’s crowded and your ask if you can sit at his table. He agrees. You get to chatting. You’re into each other. You realize you are both trying to accomplish the same thing in life. You start dating.

Still no guarantee you end up together. But when we listen to our intuition and follow it, some amazing and wonderful things follow.

To those who think our entire lives are ruled by Fate, and that everything we do was pre-ordained from the get go, then what you’re saying is that God programmed people to murder. It was ordained. God caused the space shuttle to malfunction so those people would die. It was ordained. It was supposed to happen.

Do you feel comfortable living in a world where murderers and child molesters were sent here on purpose to carry out these acts? Think about it.

I firmly subscribe to free will, plus intentions. You intend to go on the swings, on the slide, and build a castle in the sand, but maybe when you get here, you are captivated by the one interesting girl on the merry-go-round and you go play with her and never get around to building your castle. That’s okay. The playground is full of options, and you’re allowed to explore whatever you want.